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Tag Archives: tech-culture
The Glass Empire Strikes Back
Google Glass has gotten enormous grief in the last few months. Places are banning it, and people have gotten into fights over it. Even the tech journalist David Pogue finds it creepy: You no longer know if you’re being filmed … Continue reading
The Lost Engineering Paradise of DEC
I was saddened to hear the recent news that Intel is closing its Hudson MA semiconductor fab. It’s 35 years old, and couldn’t be upgraded to the latest process nodes. It’s still using 200 mm diameter wafers and a 130 … Continue reading
The Inspiring “Pale Blue Dot” and the Clunky New Horizons
I recently came across a striking animation of Carl Sagan’s famous passage from his last book “Pale Blue Dot”: Pale Blue Dot from ORDER on Vimeo. He’s commenting on this picture, taken at his request by Voyager 1 in 1990 … Continue reading
Lynn Conway, EE and Sexual Pioneer
The latest issue of IEEE Solid State Circuits magazine has a good piece by Lynn Conway about how she changed VLSI design. In a quite direct way she changed my career too. In 1979 I was just starting grad school, … Continue reading
“MIT Rising”, But Not Because of Startups
The November issue of Boston magazine has an article “How MIT Became the Most Important University in the World” by Chris Vogel. It talks about how MIT students are better dressed these days, more articulate, and more out-going. In fact, … Continue reading
“Chasing Ice” – Big Science Adventure
You’ve probably heard that climate change is melting the Arctic, but it’s another thing to see it happening in front of you: Or to see what it does to an icescape: That’s why James Balog, a well-known nature photographer, founded … Continue reading
Tech Tourism Around Boston
Boston has been industrialized for 200 years, so there’s plenty to see around the city for the technically-minded traveler, or for the local looking for a family outing. Since it’s hard to decide which are my favorites, I’ll just put … Continue reading
Enfolded in the Internet of Things
So I was at a conference the other day where the speakers were constantly using the buzz phrase “The Internet of Things”. This is where pretty much everything will have a processor in it that’s connected to some kind of … Continue reading
Amusing Children With Supercomputers
Yesterday I saw the new animated movie “Madagascar 3” at a special preview with my son. It doesn’t open for a week, but the studio, Dreamworks, held a preview for the staff of Red Hat, a Linux software services company … Continue reading
Steampunk vs Apple-ism
I had no idea how big steampunk has gotten. There was a gathering of them in Waltham this last weekend at the Watch City Festival, and 17,000 people showed up. I took the kids there on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, … Continue reading
